Bas,
>The Dutch, however, live in their own moral, not political, universe and
>increasingly so since the Pim Fortuyn murder and and neoconservatist rule
>Balkenende-style. In this small little world, there is a general fear of
>looking outwards.
One way of expressing the alienation of most people is the perceived
absence of morality from contemporary politics. It is true that moral
purposes reduce the scale of effectiveness to a personal level in the
first instance and this is often given as the reason why politicians
can't be moral in that sense. The collective good that they allegedly
pursue often leaves no room for decent human behaviour. But to be moral
is not necessarily to be small in outlook. The great religions have
always found ways of uniting personal morality with the widest social
agendas. Surely the most powerful charge against Chirac is that no-one
would ever suspect him of having a moral agenda. And so rejection of his
government fits with a desire to bring the political process closer home
than the EU could claim to be at present. These referenda on the EU
constituion have given some people the chance to register a protest
against 'politics as usual' and the moral energy they bring to that has
quite broad implications, even if they start with what matters most to
them in particular.
I have tried to explore this issue of morality and politics through the
metaphor of the gangster in The Hit Man's Dilemma:
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/thmd
Keith
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